The Loud and the Quiet

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Are you loud or quiet? Tough question, right? You don’t think it is? You think you know? You probably think you’re in the middle somewhere, somewhere a couple clicks south of loud. Lets me ask someone else, someone who knows you well, but not too well. Someone who’s close to you but not so close that they share your perspective on you. What do you think they’d say? 

I don’t know how anyone else approaches their matters, but when it comes to finding answers to deeply personal questions, my mind goes to children’s programming. Some cite thought-provoking authors like Shakespeare, Dickens, and others use The Bible. I find myself in Looney Tunes, Scooby Doo, and of course Sesame Street. 

In one of their most famous sketches, the Sesame Street team provided a psychological think piece that explored the differences between loud and quiet people. As anyone who knows Sesame Street can guess, the Muppets displayed exaggerated characteristics for comedic effect. After introducing the families, Gordon scrambles the family members together and asks us to determine which individuals belong to which family. Everything the individuals from the loud family did was loud, of course, and everything the quiet family did was quiet. The traits they displayed were comically obvious to the viewers at home, but the individuals in the experiment were surprised when we considered our choice easy. The families knew, because they were members of the loud family and the quiet family, but the individual members of the family probably didn’t think they were as loud or quiet as the rest of their family. Message received: we think we know how we are perceived, but we’re often wrong. 

I was just as shocked as those Muppets to learn that those who knew me well considered it just as obvious that I belonged to a quiet family. I never thought of myself as loud, but quiet, no. My guess is no one, especially children, considers themselves quiet. “Well, I’m not like Johnston over there, who never knows when to shut the hell up, but I’m not a quiet person.”   

Most of us don’t consider ourselves quiet people, but we concede we’re not loud either. If we were to chart our characteristics on a loud v. quiet graph, comparing ourselves to the people we know, we’d probably dot ourselves somewhere north of the point of origin, on the louder side. How shocked would we be to learn that our own friends and family members dotted us on the south side of the point, as generally quiet people? I knew loud people when I was young, and I knew I wasn’t that, but I was shocked to learn that those who know me best dropped my dot on the quieter side, and they were shocked that I was shocked. It still shocks me that I’m generally considered quieter than most, until I see a member of the loud family.

Have you ever met, or witnessed, such an exaggeration of the opposite that it changed how you thought of yourself? “I never thought of myself as a slob, until I met Darrin. He’s a couple clicks north of OCD.” “I thought I was something of an unemotional robot, until I met Adam.” I dotted myself somewhere on the loud side of the graph, until I witnessed a “so obvious, it was hilarious” member of the loud family in a restaurant I was seated in. I didn’t see her grab a napkin from the dispenser, but from everything I heard from her, in such a short time, I have to imagine that it would’ve been the loudest napkin retrieval I’ve ever heard.

Everything this woman did was loud. Her laughter drew our attention. Then, once she appeared on our radar, we realized how loud she spoke. The words that followed her laugh were part of her laughter, and we could excuse that as a natural flow from the laughter, but when she returned to normal conversation, we could hear everything she said. Her normal conversation volume was a whole bunch of decibel levels higher than any of the other patrons in restaurant.

Have you ever heard a laugh so loud that it could silence an entire restaurant? It wasn’t an “I’ll have what she’s having” laugh. It was a short, polite laugh that she unveiled to respond to a joke someone at her table told, as opposed to the raucous laughter that leads everyone to want to know the joke. It was more of a “What the hell was that?” laugh that can be a little unsettling for a couple of seconds, until we all go back to eat our food and engage in our own private conversations. 

Anytime we talk about loud people, we naturally flow into rude, sloppy, or obnoxious characterizations, but this woman didn’t appear to be any of the above. Some people go loud in an unnatural, over-the-top manner to dominate a room, but for others it just appears to be a more organic characteristic. This woman just had one of those voices, and laughs, that all but echoes throughout a sparsely populated diner.

I’ve sat with some naturally and unusually loud people. When they speak, I just assume everyone in the restaurant can hear every word they’re saying. I assume they can hear our small, personal and private conversations, and I imagine that they don’t want to hear it, but this person is so loud that they can’t help it. I was sure that that quiet couple, over in that quiet corner over there, was trying to block us out and enjoy a quiet meal together, but this guy was so loud that they can’t help but eavesdrop. We could be discussing the differences inherent in the Norwegian versus the German styles of knitting, and the rest of the restaurant hears everything he says, whether they want to or not.

When the person at my table is that loud, my shoulders instinctively cinch inwards as I attempt to camouflage myself with my chair to avoid associations with them, and I instinctually avoid dropping additions to any jokes to try to avoid making them laugh harder. Some part of me knows the patrons aren’t paying near as much attention as I fear, but I can’t help but think that it’s almost impossible for them to avoid listening in.

When I hear loud people, up close and from afar, I know I could never be with them romantically, no matter how loving, caring, or attractive they may be, because I am a private person who doesn’t enjoy drawing unwanted attention to myself. And I never thought I would be this guy. When I was younger, I thought they were the life of the party, and as far as I was concerned it was the louder the better. I don’t know if it was a crush, or a temporary romantic fling I had with the notion that louder is better, or if I was just having more fun in life when I was younger, because I thought louder people were more fun. 

Yet, nestled deep inside this comparative analysis is the idea that I’m not as quiet as some suggest. Loud people, generally speaking, have been loud their whole lives. They were probably loud babies, attention seeking children, and they never had to put much effort into it. It was just who they were, are, and always will be, and I have to think they don’t care for it. I suspect that when they grow up they find that they cannot stand loud people. Most of us, on subconscious levels, abhor what we regard as our most annoying traits. “I hate complainers,” the biggest complainers we’ve ever met say. “Whiners just annoy me,” they whine, and they’re not trying to be ironic or funny when they say it. If two loud people get together romantically, I have to think it won’t last long, because they will find it exhausting on some level that they can’t quite put their finger on. They might be attracted to one another for reasons they can’t explain, and the breakup might be just as inexplicable to them. “I don’t know why we didn’t work,” is something they might say. “Some people just don’t mesh.”

The only person they could see themselves with, long term, would be a quiet person who gives them the space to be who they are. Yet, if we pointed any of this out out to them, they would be so shocked that they’d refute it, “You think I’m loud? What about Billy?” It’s the whataboutism defense, but it’s not a ruse. They genuinely believe that they’re not loud, because they can always find someone louder. If we concede that they’re not as loud as Billy, we might add that they’re still louder than most. “Why do you say that?” they might ask, and we will have to be careful how we answer, because whenever we point out a trait generally perceived to be negative, most people will exaggerate it into an insult.

I didn’t think any less of the loud patron at the restaurant, as I’m able to block out most distractions around my table, but she did draw my attention away from the conversations I was having, and she did so on at least three different occasions. I don’t view it as a negative characteristic, or even a flaw, to be louder or quieter than the average person, but it’s all those other attachments we make, loud equals obnoxious and obnoxious equals rude, and quiet equals shy, insecure, and personality-free that leads us all to fight labels.   

The Sesame Street sketch was done with colorful Muppets characterizing with exaggeration, but if it were done with real people, individuals from both parties would be insulted to learn that we consider them so obvious and simple for us to decide which family they belong in. Most of us will concede that our dot on the graph sits somewhere around the point of origin, but we’re shocked when someone suggests we’re closer to an exaggeration than we know. We might never know, until we hear a humorous exaggeration. Even then, we might hold onto that exaggeration as an example we use to inform people that we’re not as loud, or quiet, as all those Muppets out there.

Bill Murray is Funny

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“It can’t be that easy for him,” Steve Martin is reported to have said about friend and fellow actor Bill Murray. “It just can’t.”

Some guys are just funny. We hated them in high school, because they could effortlessly do, what the rest of us worked so hard to do: Make people laugh. Was there a super-secret formula to their success? Not that we could see. They could just lift an eyebrow in a particular situation, or smirk in a somewhat sarcastic, somewhat serious way, and put everyone on the floor. It was frustrating to those of us who’ve had to work our way through the dark and mysterious halls of funny to find that which they just had sort of attached to them at birth. Everyone wanted to be around them to hear what they might say next, and they hoped that he liked them half as much as they liked him. Why? Because he was funny, naturally and effortlessly, funny. “Some guys just are,” we might tell our kids facing similar circumstances, “and there’s nothing you can really do about it.”

Bill Murray, I have to imagine, was one of those guys we all hated in high school. He was the fifth of nine kids in the Murray family, and we can imagine that some of his comedy came from striving for some attention in such a crowded home, but we also have to imagine that comedy was a way of life in that Irish, Catholic home. Regardless how it came about, Bill Murray became one of the best comedic actors of his generation, and as his stint on Saturday Night Live shows displayed, he had great improvisational skills too, but I’m sure if we saw him attempt to do standup, we might see through his otherwise bullet-proof veneer. We’ve heard man-on-the-street stories of him engaging in improvisational acts that prove hilarious, but those are based on his good guy graciousness as a well-known celebrity. If we could somehow remove his status, and read through these stories, would he still be funny? Impossible to know, because they’re built on his iconography, as well as adding to it. Bill Murray movies, however, are almost all funny, some hilarious, and others are enshrined in our personal hall of fame of funny. 

What is the super-secret formula to Bill Murray’s success? My guess is that there isn’t one, and that might be his secret. Bill Murray does have an undeniable everyman appeal in that he’s not gorgeous, he doesn’t have great skin or hair, and while he’s not fat, no one would say he’s fit and trim. He is just a funny man. He is the embodiment of the annoying “It is what is” principle. I go to see his movies, because he’s funny. Why is he just as funny, or funnier, than his peers? “I don’t know, he just is.” 

Anytime we discuss the merits of one actor over another, there is always the question of presentation. Everyone from the lighting guy to the director and the editor plays some role in the way Bill Murray is presented to the audience. Murray, as has been reported, can be difficult to work, because he doesn’t feel like certain people know how to do their jobs. Does this have anything to do with the idea that Bill knows how all the players need to work together to form this presentation, because he’s seen quality players do it? If that’s the source of his reported obnoxiousness, then he obviously knows how to cultivate and foster his presentation, which is more effort than that which we accredited to him.

To everyone from the frustrated peer to the casual fan, it appears as though Bill Murray just coasts through his movies, and he isn’t even trying to be funny or dramatic, depending on the role he’s playing in a movie. He’s just Bill Murray in the way Tom Cruise is just Tom Cruise and Clint Eastwood is just Clint Eastwood. Bill Murray is also so consistently Bill Murray that we know what to expect from the productions he participates in, in the same manner we know what to expect in a Starbucks franchise or an AC/DC song. 

Now we have Steve Matin, one of Murray’s peers and colleagues, a man who began around the same time, has attempted to do as almost as many comedic and dramatic movies, and TV shows saying he basically agrees that it doesn’t appear as though Bill Murray is even trying. Regardless the actual number of movies, or the debate over comedic quality, the two can be viewed as colleagues in many ways, and he views Murray’s career as so effortless that it’s almost frustrating to him. 

It’s not our intention to belittle Steve Martin’s brilliant and influential career, as we think it speaks for itself, but he’s obviously worked very hard to achieve everything he has. Bill Murray, on the other hand, has achieved similar heights without seeming to try near as hard. We’re sure that Murray does his due diligence, research, mental preparation, and everything else it takes to make a quality production, but it doesn’t appear that way. In terms of perception alone, it appears as though Bill Murray rolls out of a hammock shortly after someone yells, “Action!” delivers his lines, and goes back to his hammock funnier than the rest of us will ever be no matter how much work and effort we put into it. 

If you have to try that hard, you’re probably not very funny, you might counter, and you’d be right, but we have all had to learn how to be funny. Learning the beats, rhythms, and everything else it takes to be funny is often done by osmosis. We don’t learn how to be funny in the same way we learn math, how to play baseball, or how to be an electrician. We pick up various elements of our presentation from our peers, that crazy-funny uncle, and our TV shows and movies. If you were around during the Seinfeld/Friends era, you saw how they influenced what it takes to be funny, and you picked up some tips and copied the actors’ mannerisms, their tones, and sometimes we stole the lines their writers wrote for them. They, and numerous others of course, defined funny in our era. Other eras had Abbot and Costello, The Honeymooners, and The Lucille Ball Show define funny. We’ve also had others tell us “That’s not funny!” and we adapted and adjusted to the current cultural norms of funny, and in some ways, it took some definition of work to do so. Others, it seemed, didn’t have to go through all those trials and errors. They just seemed to fall into funny, because that’s who they were.     

These funny people weren’t great looking either. Bill Murray, for example, does not have what we consider “leading man” looks. I’m not trying to diss the man, as he’s probably better looking than I am, but if we were to take headshots and show them to citizens of another culture, with the headshots of a couple of great looking character actors and ask them to, “Pick out the leading man in movies in our country,” Bill Murray might be the last chosen. I don’t know if he’s ugly, but he has an unmade bed look about him. He doesn’t have great skin, and he barely has any hair left, and he rarely changes facial expressions in the course of his movies, but movie directors flood his 1-800 number to try to get him to lead, or at least appear, in their movie.   

Most of us worked hard to be funny, shortly after we realized we didn’t have anything else going for us, and it was so frustrating for us to see someone roll out of bed funny. We can all identify with Steve Martin’s complaints, because we all know someone who achieves what we worked so hard for with such apparent effortlessness. If you’ve ever watched camp counselors, teenagers, try to MC an event, you’ve seen them try to work the audience (of camp goers and their parents), you’ve seen them try to act crazy, nuts, and fun, and you’ve walked away thinking, they could really use a natural speaker with some unusual levels of charisma, a Tripper (Bill Murray’s character in Meatballs). If you’ve ever seen a grown man sing with a full stage show, with dancers, pyrotechnics, and anything and everything to entertain an audience, you know that there are just some men and women who, armed with nothing but a microphone, can sing a song called Star Wars, and produce one of the funniest things ever seen. How does he do it? No one, not even one of the other funniest men of his generation, knows. He just does. When we watch it, we send out Steve Martin’s “It can’t be that easy!” complaint sent out to the unfairness of the universe.   

Dream Crushers

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“I have so many ideas rolling around in my head, some really great ones,” a man named Kelley told me. “I just need some money to make them work, and I’ve never had any money.” Some might laugh at such a foolish notion, and some of us might say, ‘If your ideas are so great, why haven’t you done anything about them?’ 

Kelley wouldn’t tell me what his ideas were. He avoided answering me when I asked for specifics, and he quickly changed the subject when he saw that I wasn’t going to let it go. He enjoyed my general level of intrigue, because most idea guys don’t even receive that, but my guess is he didn’t want to risk damaging that interest by telling me what his ideas were. I knew why Kelley did that, because I was Kelley on so many occasions, and I saw my listeners’ faces turn to ‘that’s kind of dumb’ disappointment when I actually told them what my ideas were. I knew the vulnerability, bordering on fragility, and I also knew what happened when we accidentally gave a cynical, once-bitten hyena one of our ideas. I knew what it felt like when they took a chunk of flesh. What Kelley didn’t know, because he couldn’t, was that I was so into the plight of the idea man that I often waited for them to finish to offer them blind encouragement. Since Kelley didn’t know me, he just assumed that I was one of those who consider it their responsibility to crush idea men at the gate.

“I don’t see it as mean,” former talent judge from the show American Idol, Simon Cowell, once said regarding crushing other peoples’ dreams. “I see it as freeing them from their lifelong dream of being a singer. No one ever told them that they couldn’t sing before. When I tell them, it frees them up to pursue all these other avenues in life.” This isn’t an exact quote, but it is so close that it gives us some idea what Cowell probably dreamed up one night to presumably free himself of the guilt that caused his chronic bouts of insomnia.

All these years later, we learn that that wasn’t the real Simon Cowell. Simon Cowell, we learn, wasn’t a mean man. He had to learn how to be one. A TV executive, named Mike Darnell, states that “In all the other shows before him, everyone was polite and nice, and I knew [crushing people’s dreams in the meanest way possible] was going to be [his] thing. Simon, to his credit, was willing to do anything.” Simon Cowell had to learn how to be a mean character if he wanted American Idol to succeed, and “He was willing to do anything”, including absolutely crush the dreams of the participants on the show to achieve his own fame and fortune. Is this supposed to vindicate the guy? Not only could I not be that guy, no matter what rewards awaited me, I couldn’t even watch his show. I watched it once, because everyone told me it was so fantastic, but I couldn’t bear to watch the glimmer of hope fall out of the eyes of my fellow dreamers when Simon Cowell’s mean-spirited character laid them out.   

I don’t know if I’m the opposite of Simon Cowell, when it comes to idea men floating their dreams to me, but I approach their pitch from an ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about’ mindset. This mindset was born the day Beanie Babies hit our store shelves. The idea that we had a line that stretched from our hotel entrance to the gift shop, where they were sold, set my beliefs about the American consumer back by about ten years. If I were a toy executive, listening to the Beanie Baby pitch from the idea men who brought it to me, I probably would’ve said something along the line of, “I like them, they’re well done, cute, and all that, but if we buy your product, we’re not going to devote much of our resources to their manufacturing, and we’re not going to devote much to their marketing either. We already have a certain percentage of our budget devoted to the teddy bear market, and I don’t see how these products demand anything beyond our typical financial devotion to a product.” As we all know, this is but one bit of evidence that ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about’ when it comes to the desires of the typical consumer, or ideas in general.  

Simon Cowell, I suspect, also “Learned how to be mean” to establish his bona fides as man who did know what he was talking about. To establish his status as an authoritative expert, the show’s organizers front-loaded it with talent that couldn’t sing. I could see that, you could see that, and Simon Cowell could see it too, and he was so frank in his assessments that some could mistake it as cruel. “Hey, he needs to hear that, because he is bad,” audience members said while they were laughing. Simon Cowell, his handlers, and the corporate execs obviously did their research on how to create a character that fed into the American definition of an authoritative expert who knew what he was talking about. If they were correct, and the ratings show that they were, the American definition of the man who holds the keys to the kingdom is a mean man. We see this in our movies and cartoons, and it’s become an affixed image in our brains. If the American public were going to take Simon Cowell seriously, he was going to have to be theatrical when informing those who lost in first round, and he would have to remain unconcerned with their feelings, because being nice and polite is boring, and it doesn’t feed into the American definition of an authoritative expert. 

We might think that an idea man, listening to the ideas of another man, would want to avoid every trait of the Simon Cowell character. We might think that after getting ripped apart by their own hyenas and jackals that they would be more sympathetic and empathetic than the average man to the tumultuous path of the idea. We might think they would want to be the confidant, the facilitator, or the one person that the idea man can count on to be supportive. We might even think that an idea men would strive to create mutual appreciation relationships to treat the ideas of idea men the way they want theirs to be treated. In my relatively limited experience, they do the opposite. They skeptically diminish, deride, and dismiss all others’ ideas to essentially clear the deck of ideas, so theirs is the only one left standing. It’s a “My idea might be flawed, but it’s not as flawed as yours” methodology of propping their ideas up by pushing everyone else’s down.    

These clear-the-decks idea men share many characteristics with the Bigfoot experts. If you’ve ever watched an exploration of the Bigfoot universe, you’ve been inundated with the experts in this field of cryptozoology. As with idea men, the breadth of the various pitches they offer to establish their authoritative expertise on the subject often devolves to tearing down the competition. One expert, we’ll call him Tom, claims to be the Big Foot expert. Tom claims to have had numerous harrowing encounters. He provides details of those encounters (cue the actor in the hairy suit for the reenactment), and he shows us evidence of those encounters, such as the plaster cast footprint, a ripped tent, or a damaged car to show the wrath of the Bigfoot. Based on his numerous experiences, the evidence, and his particularly charismatic and convincing presentation, Tom is widely regarded as the Big Foot expert. This bothers Dick, the lesser-known but up-and-coming expert in this field. We might think Dick might try to rival Tom’s experiences with his own, but he chooses to try to poke holes in Toms’ stories, until it’s fairly obvious that he’s trying to destroy Tom’s legacy in the field. Dick claims that true cryptozoologists, with a Bigfoot focus, know Tom’s claims are “dubious to say the least.” Dick tries to establish his bona fides in the Big Foot community by scrutinizing Tom’s claims, as if they’re not rooted in the scientific method. Dick then lists some of his own credentials, his theories, and his firsthand experiences, but the breadth of his presentation focuses on bringing Tom, the widely-recognized expert in the field, down. Harry refutes Tom and Dick’s claims with a “If this is true then that would have to be true too” prosecutorial breakdown that leads the audience to believe that Tom and Dick’s presentations are basically nonsense. Thus, Harry claims to be the “real expert” by a last man standing process of elimination. In the end, no parties produce irrefutable information, because there isn’t any, and as a result the experts, like the idea men, end up dueling over the circumstantial evidence they gathered. 

Our ideas might be flawed. We might not be as funny as we think, we might not know how to sing, or we might not be able to write good(emoji), but our dreams and ideas secretly make us feel special. They’re what we think separates us from the pack. I could see this in the aforementioned Kelley’s eyes. He thought his very general pitch was a declaration that he wasn’t a low-level, blue-collar worker like me. He was (trumpet’s blare) an idea man, and the only reason he wasn’t there yet was he didn’t have any money. We all think if we just had a few thousand dollars, or the right connection to that person in the know, or that big break that the man had, everyone would know that we’re not just idea men. We’re the real deal, not like Anthony over there, who’s just a dreamer. “You have to know someone to get somewhere,” we frustrated types say when we don’t get where we need to be. “It’s all a game, and you have to know how to play it to get there.”

The idea that none of us are who you think we are, “a common blue-collar worker like you,” and we’re actually a lot more special than anyone knows, was brilliantly captured on the classic show Taxi. No one in the blue-collar dispatch area, on that show, was just a cab driver: one driver was also boxer who drove a taxi for the money, another an actor, a receptionist in an art gallery, and the last was a guy just working there to put himself through college. After each character went through their real roles in life, the character Alex Rieger declared, “It looks like I’m the only taxi driver here.” Their dreams, our dreams, are our way of getting through the rigamarole of the daily life of the worker, and the general tedium of life. They are our reason to wake up in the morning, and the reason we keep going through the routines of life, but some of the times our ideas aren’t as great as we think they are, and we’re afraid of meeting that Simon Cowell-type who will not only tell us the truth, but humiliate and emasculate us for ever dreaming in the first place. Simon Cowell-types can say that their goal is to free us from unreasonable ideas, aspirations, and dreams, but we all know that they enjoy laying out the harsh realities of life.

***

Did you ever have a dream? We all did, when we were all dumb and stupid in our twenties. Our dreams may have been delusional and a “total waste of time”, but they were all ours. Did someone come along and deliver a harsh dose of reality to you? Have you ever passed this knowledge on? Did it feel good? Okay, maybe not good in the literal sense, but how about justified? Some people, and we all know who they are, love to crush dreamers with a reality hammer, because they’re more than happy to help someone else in this regard. 

“The trick is to hold onto your young dreams.” –George Meredith

Dreams are largely a refuge of the young. Talk to any kid, and you’ll hear about their dreams, all of them. If you fear that your kid might be headed down a delusional and a “total waste of time” path that you hate to see them spend one second pursuing it, wait a second, don’t say a word, wait, and be patient. They’ll have another, totally different dream tomorrow. Until someone comes along to effectively crush our dreams, we’re still in this dream-like state in our twenties. The only problem is we don’t have any money, no connections, and absolutely no path to seeing our ideas and dreams to fruition. 

If it’s true that our brains don’t fully formulate until we’re twenty-six-years-old, the twenties are our last vestiges of youth, but we’re old enough and mature enough to start seeking concrete paths for our youthful dreams. The thirties are a rough time for dreams, as the faint light at the end of the tunnel begins to fade in the decade we spend in the workplace, but we’re also not so old, yet, that we consider those dreams foolish notions. That usually happens in our forties, as we begin to whittle away at the idea pool to sort out the outlandish, never-gonna-happen dreams, and we become more realistic. Few of our dreams last into our sixties, as we begin to realize that we should’ve either focused our mind more on the more realistic dreams we had or given up on all of it sooner and focused on something that mattered so much more.

This general, and relative lifecycle of dreamers can be artificially altered and disrupted by dream crushers, and as I write, they think they’re doing a service to their fellow man. They don’t consider the idea that we all think different, and some of us can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. When I hear a dream crusher brag about injecting a dose of reality in another’s head, and they always do with some measure of pride, I ask them, “Why would you do something like that?” When I ask that in an emotionally charged manner, I can see, in the manner in which they answer, that that was the last question they expected from us, or anyone else for that matter. You can also see that they failed to consider the other side of their advice, or that that person might just be different than them.    

“You heard their idea. It was ludicrous, and a total waste of time. Someone had to say something. I think it was for their own good that they hear that,” they say. They also add some variation of, “Better they hear it from me than someone who doesn’t care about them.”

“Okay,” I said, “but did it actually benefit them? I think we can both agree that he’s an upstanding man, good father, good husband, quality friend and employee.”

“From what we know, yeah.”

“And most of the time he “wastes” pursuing a dream “that was never going to happen,” was done with whatever free time he had left. If all that was true, and as you say from what we know it was, how did your dose of reality benefit him?”

“He was just wasting so much time and energy on it. I couldn’t bear to watch it anymore. Someone had to tell him the truth before he got his heart broken.”

“So, you broke his heart to prevent him from getting his heart broken? While you were smashing, did you ever consider the idea that some portion of the happy-go-lucky, unflappable personality that you and I know and love was based on those outlandish dreams and unrealistic goals? What if he believed you, or you made some kind of dent? What if he stops pursuing his lifelong dream, based on what you said? How would you feel if he come back to us as hopeless and cynical as you are? Would you feel vindicated, or would you realize that he’s probably not going to tell you, or anyone else, what his dreams are anymore, if he continues to pursue them. And what if he doesn’t? What if he admires and respects your opinion so much that he realizes that pursuing his dream was a waste of time and energy, and he just gives up on them? It’s possible that he might come back to us a little more unhappy than he was yesterday.”